The Air Force recently came by and did some simulated bomb runs on City Hall. The idea is that ground controllers need practice guiding air strikes in urban areas. Most bomb ranges are way the heck out in the middle of nowhere and lack urban terrain, so they come up here and do their thing.

Makes sense to me – you guys in blue do know how to rock on completely.

The paper described the AttackSimEx [1] as controversial but the only people who actually objected were six members from the Fox Valley Peace Coalition. One of whom was confused about what he was upset about.

“Apparently, this exercise is to improve the accuracy of bombs so they don’t have the ‘collateral damage,'” he said. “Collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent people, and I strongly object to my government killing innocent people. This is one small gesture on my part to at least make this known.”

Um, yeah. Actually the military [2] is all about killing as many people as possible; good, bad, innocent, guilty as sin, as long as the gun sight lays on ’em we’ll pull the trigger. Our only problem is we can’t slaughter them fast enough; they keep wiggling around and throwing off our aim.

No, it’s the nancy pants [3] in Accounting that insist we get as much bang for the buck as possible. While carpet bombing is a whole lotta fun and a terrific emotional release it’s just not effective enough. The taxpayer is footing the bill and it’s our fiduciary responsibility to make sure the bombs land as close to the actual target as possible. That way we can use less of them – it’s a win-win for everyone.

Except the guys who are actually the target. But we in the War Mongering business call this hard cheese.

That angular monstrosity is City Hall – the target. Talk about putting the ‘close’ in close-air support …

[1] I have no idea if the milspeak shorthand for this really is AttackSimEx or not – but if it were it would not surprise me.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.